Many thanks for your thoughts, harshl..
At the mo only got the 250GB drive in situ - and still loads of space so its not really an immediate issue - more a thought really for when *the time* arrives...

Dunno about NOT WANTING to learn Linux - got the books and every now and then I have a delve but so many parameters for most things, etc... and I've been with PCs since early 80's and done the MS-DOS command line stuff an' all....

Oh well, keep reading the books I suppose and hope for that flash of inspiration - and a bit more free time to do it!
Anyway, I've found a couple of topics on here that deal with doing the 'incantations' that possibly I can follow parrot fashion - and probably start to learn Linux the way I learnt Basic (typing in the magazine listings and then debugging to make them work - and then adding/amending to make them work better! - oh those were the days!

)
BTW - I did the SME 7.1 upgrade without any problems whatsoever... I'd spent several hours sorting out making the backups of my data first (had problems with the Windows PC I was backing up to!) ... but they weren't needed and the upgrade itself took less than 10 minutes!

Anyway, thanks again... Steve